The Credential Marketplace Is Growing

Donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into education and workforce training programs. Some of that money has funded credentials that helped workers move to better jobs and higher wages. Some has funded credentials that look good on paper but deliver little in the labor market.

There’s often no straightforward, reliable way to tell the difference between useful and useless credentials. But that’s changing. Two new tools can help donors tell the difference and decide what to support.

The Credential Value Index, from the Burning Glass Institute, gives funders first-time access to independent, outcome-based data on more than 23,000 non-degree credentials like certifications, licenses, and apprenticeships. The index is built from a database of more than 65 million career histories and tracks what actually happened to workers’ wages and career trajectories after they earned a given credential, rather than relying on what institutions report about themselves. It reports outcomes side by side on topics such as wage gains, new jobs, career advancement, and skill growth, so funders can see what kind of value a credential delivers.

Alongside it, the HEA Group and Open Campus have developed the Certificate Earnings Explorer, covering undergraduate, credit-bearing certificate programs at colleges short of a full degree. It uses federal financial-aid records matched to Internal Revenue Service earnings data, providing program-level earnings data on more than 5,500 such programs across all fifty states.

Together, these tools do more than advance research. They raise the bar for what responsible philanthropic investment in education and workforce development should look like. By providing donors with more information, they enable them to make smarter, more impactful gifts.

The full credential market is far larger than most donors realize. Credential Engine, a nonprofit that maintains a credential registry, counts more than 1.85 million credentials from traditional high school diplomas and college degrees to badges, certificates, and employer-led programs. These come from over 134,000 providers, with $2.34 trillion spent annually on education and training. It catalogs what exists without judging what’s worth pursuing.

The arrival of Workforce Pell on July 1 heralds the extension of federal Pell Grant eligibility to qualifying short-term programs, making this problem of gauging credential value more urgent, not less. Federal dollars will now follow students into a credential marketplace that remains largely uncharted. Philanthropy has both an opportunity and a responsibility to help map it.

Programs and credentials are not purely economic instruments. They help build the relationships, networks, and institutional standing that create long-term opportunity, or what might be called social wealth. Philanthropy’s contribution includes moving those programs, credentials, and relationships from boutique offerings serving a lucky few to baseline infrastructure available to anyone who needs them.

What makes the Credential Value Index particularly rigorous and valuable is its design. It compares credential earners to a matched group of similar workers who did not earn that credential. This allows it to isolate what the credential itself, not a worker’s existing skills or background, actually contributed to wages, career advancement, and field transitions. The results show enormous variation. Top-performing credentials in fields like data science produce roughly $5,000 in added wage gains beyond their match. Many others produce none.

The Explorer complements this at the program level with state-by-state earnings data drawn from the same federal financial-aid system that Workforce Pell now extends to short-term credentials, offering geographic specificity the Index alone doesn’t provide.

Used together, the two tools give funders a two-lens view of which credential types generate real value nationally and how specific programs measure up against a local benchmark. These tools don’t simplify philanthropic decision-making, but they clarify what responsible decision-making now requires.

Here are six suggestions for what philanthropists and foundations can do now:

• Use the Credential Value Index as a standard due-diligence tool when evaluating workforce credential programs.
• Look beyond a single wage-gain snapshot to career advancement, field transitions, and professional networks that build social wealth over time.
• Prioritize programs reaching first-generation learners, career changers, and workers in fields disrupted by automation, and use the Index to verify that they deliver real value.
• Use the Certificate Earnings Explorer to identify high-performing certificate programs in the states and regions where you fund, and scale what they do right.
• Resist scaling programs whose narratives are compelling but whose outcome data is thin. Ask grantees to demonstrate value using independent, provider-agnostic evidence rather than self-reported completion rates.
• Advocate for outcome transparency as a philanthropic norm. Funders who require independent outcome data as a condition of support raise the evidence standard for the entire marketplace.

The arrival of Workforce Pell marks a genuine inflection point. It’s a moment when federal policy, labor market demand, and new data infrastructure are converging to expand opportunity at scale. Philanthropy has helped build many of the workforce programs that will now enter this system.

The question is whether funders will hold those programs, and themselves, to the higher evidence standard the moment demands. Using these tools isn’t a bureaucratic exercise. It’s how philanthropic investment becomes something more than a bet on a good story.

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